The Food Apartheid: How Redlining Continues to Withhold Healthy Food From Black Americans

Since George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis Police on May 25th, the world has seen unceasing demonstrations, protests, large-scale activism, and real change within the systems that have continued to oppress and fail Black people. Even your racist Aunt Deborah is starting to question her role in the continued oppression of and indifference to Black people and other BIPOC in this country as a privileged white woman. Things are changing; the air feels a little different (not just because of the virus), and it feels like this time, we might really be onto something. 

The only way to understand the plight of Black people in the United States as it relates to the current issues they face, though, is to go back. In 1619, slavery began and lasted nearly 250 years. In 1865, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery (although Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was signed over two years earlier, but this executive order wasn’t enforced everywhere and many slaves continued to live and work without their freedom during that time.) In 1954, segregation ended. These dates are important, and the work that was done over those few centuries was necessary to push a country that was founded on the idea that all men were created equal, forward. Aunt Deborah, if you’re reading this, *SPOILER ALERT AHEAD*.

Segregation was deemed unconstitutional after Brown vs Board of Education in 1954, but what couldn’t be written into legislation was the condemnation of the implicit and explicit racial biases that were ingrained and indoctrinated into the white people of the United States for the last several hundred years. Black people had finally been granted their constitutional right to freedom- but they were not treated equally to their white peers. 

Perhaps the most egregious example of these disparities can be found in the federal government agency processes of “redlining”. This is the process by which federal institutions including banking, insurance, and healthcare systematically deny coverage and resources, or raise prices specifically for Black people. In the 1960’s, housing developments would advertise their available homes as “whites only”, mortgages would not be offered to Black people on homes in certain neighborhoods, and slowly, Black people and other minorities were forced into “ghettos” while white people sprawled out across the rest of the suburban landscape, enjoying the spoils of home ownership, access public transportation, and food. 

Supermarket redlining works much the same way. Redlining effectively notated “zones” within cities that were made up of predominantly minority populations, who had low incomes and low levels of education, which scared away potential investors and retailers to set up shop. A supermarket or grocery store looks at the demographics of certain neighborhoods to determine its viability as a business. Can the store turn a profit? Will its patrons visit frequently enough to cover the low profit margins on perishable food items? Is the proposed location in a high-theft and therefore high-risk neighborhood? 

Supermarket chains "have a demographic location profile that prioritizes communities that are not low income and not African American," said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an organization that opposes concentrated economic power in communities. "The outcome has a racial bias." On average, in the 50 largest US metro areas, roughly 17.7% of predominantly Black neighborhoods had limited access to supermarkets, compared to 7.6% of largely white neighborhoods, according to an analysis conducted for CNN Business by the Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit community development organization. (Source: CNN)

In the 1960s, America saw something called “white flight”, or the mass exodus of white people from the cities to suburbs outside of the city, largely due to racial unrest going on in the city during the height of the Civil Rights movement. Grocery stores and supermarkets saw (and took) the opportunity to move with white people to the suburbs and build bigger supermarkets with wider aisles and bigger shelves to hold more food. They had access to cheap, undeveloped suburban land to build parking lots on, which could accommodate more customers. In an industry where profit margins were around 1%-2%, supermarkets and big-box chain stores followed the money. In 1993, Business Enterprise Trust, a nonprofit group, characterized the retail industry's attitude, saying, "it makes no sense to serve distressed areas when profits in the serene suburbs come so easily." (Source: CNN) But the racist way in which cities’ food supply has been sectioned off has caused what we used to refer to as a “food desert”. As Karen Washington puts it, “it’s food apartheid.”

Washington is a food justice activist, Black farmer and community organizer in New York. She believes that the term “food desert” removes the historical intention of the lack of healthy food being available in Black and brown neighborhoods- and she’s right. The lack of healthy foods in lower income, minority neighborhoods is by design.

"At equal levels of poverty, Black census tracts had the fewest supermarkets [and] white tracts had the most," Johns Hopkins researchers found in their 2014 analysis of census and food retailer data. Poor neighborhoods with majority Latino populations still had more access to fresher, healthier food than their Black counterparts, suggesting that it is not poverty, but rather, race that is causing these disparities.

For many people living in Black neighborhoods, groceries and healthy food are just harder to come by. According to the NAICS code (the standard used by the federal statistical agencies in classifying business establishments), small corner grocery stores are statistically lumped together with supermarkets, such as Safeway, Whole Foods Market, etc. In other words, a community with no supermarket and two corner grocery stores that offer liquor and food would be counted as having two retail food outlets even though the food offered may be extremely limited and consist mainly of junk food. While unhealthy eating may be economically cheaper in the short-term, the consequences of long-term constrained access to healthy foods is one of the main reasons that ethnic minority and low-income populations suffer from statistically higher rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other diet-related conditions than the general population. (Source: foodispower.org)

Just as redlining in housing and banking have endured and continued to hurt Black Americans by perpetuating racial wealth gaps across generations, supermarket redlining continues to negatively shape the health and quality of life of Black people in this country. If we are fighting for equality for Black people in America, we can’t ignore the short-term and long-term mental and physical health effects of restriction to unhealthy foods in their communities and families.